Obama to formally announce James Comey as FBI pick

President Barack Obama will announce Friday that he is nominating James Comey, a veteran prosecutor and senior Bush administration official, to be the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

A White House official said the president will unveil the long-expected pick — widely reported in late May — at an afternoon ceremony.

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If confirmed by the Senate, Comey would replace Robert Mueller, who’s led the FBI since September 2001. FBI directors are limited to a single 10-year term, though the Senate extended Mueller’s term by an additional two years at Obama’s request, amid other major national security personnel changes.

The pick would put a registered Republican who served twice in the George W. Bush administration — as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and as deputy attorney general — into an important and sensitive post.

“In Jim Comey, the men and women of the FBI will have the leadership of one of our nation’s most skilled and respected national security and law enforcement professionals,” the White House official said. “In more than two decades as a prosecutor and national security professional, Jim has demonstrated unwavering toughness, integrity and principle in defending both our security and our values.”

Comey spent 15 years as a federal prosecutor before arriving at the Justice Department in 2003 for a 20-month stint as Attorney General John Ashcroft’s top deputy.

Despite his partisan ties, Comey was widely seen as an apolitical prosecutor and drew praise from civil libertarians in 2004 for rebuffing pressure from the Bush White House to approve the reauthorization of a terrorist surveillance program.

After leaving the Bush administration, Comey spent five years at Lockheed Martin as general counsel and senior vice president, before serving as general counsel for Connecticut-based hedge fund Bridgewater Associates. Since leaving the firm in early 2013, he’s been affiliated with Columbia Law School.

The White House official said Thursday that Comey’s range of experiences across industries “have given him a unique skill set and a deep understanding of the threats that criminals and terrorists pose to both our physical and economic security.”

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Mueller said that he had discussed possible successors with the president and that the agency has “prepared the extensive materials that the successor will have to review.”

As rumors of the Comey nomination emerged in May, the American Civil Liberties Union raised concerns about his role in the Bush administration.

Though the group doesn’t take official positions on appointees, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said in a statement last month that “there are many questions regarding Comey’s record that deserve careful scrutiny from the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

“As the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration,” Romero said.

Among the complaints: that Comey appears to have played a role in approving enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, oversaw the indefinite detention of a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil and, said Romero, “reportedly approved programs that struck at the very core of who we all are as Americans.”